


at twice the speed (of you and me)

by summerstorm



Category: American Idol RPF, Music RPF
Genre: F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-31
Updated: 2010-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-23 01:31:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerstorm/pseuds/summerstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You're thinking too hard," David says beside her. They're waiting backstage for their cue to come out; he's supposed to introduce her, and she's supposed to go out there, perform, and then kiss him in front of the entire audience. Kiss him on the mouth. And make it look like an accident.</p><p>Of course she's overthinking it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	at twice the speed (of you and me)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for doctor_jehane @ LJ in the cookleta_etc December 2010 holiday exchange.

"You're thinking too hard," David says beside her. They're waiting backstage for their cue to come out; he's supposed to introduce her, and she's supposed to go out there, perform, and then kiss him in front of the entire audience.

Kiss him on the mouth. And make it look like an accident.

Of course she's overthinking it. She's never outright lied like this. She hasn't even told her publicist. She's going to mess up, and it's going to be painfully embarrassing.

"We don't _have_ to do this," David says. "You can still back out."

"I don't want to back out. I'm just worried I'll be horribly obvious and everyone will be able to tell I'm lying."

"You've acted before," he says, his face the picture of calmness.

"Not _well_ ," she snaps.

"Trust me, if anyone messes up, it will be me."

"Is that supposed to help?"

He snorts a laugh. "Just remember one thing," he says, clutching her shoulders and looking her in the eye. "If you don't do it, I'm not going to either, okay? So don't worry about that. It's your call. Any way you cut it, it's your call."

She nods quickly before he leaves. He's right. They decided she'd be the one to initiate. It's a lot easier for him to roll with the punches than it is for her, and she's still not even completely sure she wants to do this. If the ball's in her court, she can take it and run away with it, and no one has to know about it.

Her performance does not go well. She's anxious, and she keeps glancing back at David, who's standing backstage where she can see him. Her head's elsewhere. It's not good, but at the same time, it kind of is. It's suspicious. It's probably easy to read as — love, or whatever. As her being on a stage near a person she's worried the world will discover is her boyfriend. As the polar opposite of what's really going on.

They have a little script to get through, after, and if she's honest she never deliberately decides to put off the big outing. It just slips her mind, and he either doesn't remind her or reminds her in a way that doesn't work, because she completely misses it.

Once they're off camera and their mikes are off, he says, "We're still surrounded by press if you change your mind," before being pulled away for a quick interview with a guy from MTV.

"I haven't changed my mind to begin with," she says to his back, and he looks over his shoulder and smiles at her, this warm, reassuring grin.

She just needs to have some freaking courage, is what she needs. A little panic is better than the guilt she feels every time the press badgers Mike about her. For some reason that escapes Carrie's understanding, they're convinced he cheated on her, and they won't get it into their hard freaking skulls that _that is not why she got a divorce_. It doesn't even matter how many times she denies those rumors, and she's denied them an absurd amount of times in the past five months.

That was how this started, actually. She'd had a very frustrating encounter with a bunch of paparazzi, who kept asking her the same question she'd just released a statement saying NO to the week before, earlier that day, and she met David for lunch in LA. They hadn't seen each other in a while and he deserved to hear about what had happened with Mike in person. Besides, at least her friends believed her when she told the truth.

She was complaining about the whole adultery drama whirlwind and she said something, something like, "They're seriously not going to stop until I get a new boyfriend," and suddenly David said, "So date me."

It was unexpected, and it took her a few seconds to process it. "You're not really—asking me out, are you?"

"In a manner of speaking," David said, shrugging. "No, okay, I am pathetically single, you're—"

"About the same?"

"Yeah, I was going to say _temporarily, beautifully_ alone, but that works too. We're both single, we've been friends for years, it wouldn't be _outlandish_ if we happened to—fall in love. Be together."

She cocks her head. "Are you _pitching_ a relationship to me?"

"Yeah," he said, and she frowned. "A fake one, but yeah."

She laughed. "You should have started with that. I would have said no and spared you the babbling."

Of course, a few hours after that, the paparazzi did a fantastic job showing her how much easier everything would be if everyone stopped acting like she was still hung up on Mike. She was handling Mike just fine. Her main problem with him at that point was she'd found a buyer for their house and he was having doubts about selling it.

David picked up the phone lightning fast when she called him up, and the conversation went by in about as little time. She said, "That fake relationship thing. You weren't kidding about that, were you?"

"I was only kidding if you are now," he said.

"I didn't say anything," she retorted, "there's your answer." She took a deep breath. "Are you sure you can handle it?"

She regretted the question immediately, because really, she knew better than to get David started on why his own ideas were good ideas. He did give her some pretty compelling arguments, though; the part about the two of them being in the same business was unnecessary, but he also pointed out several other things that made her decision easier. For instance, since they were already friends, no personal info cramming would be required ("Shame," she said, "I was kinda looking forward to the flashcards.") and her family already knew him and had learned to tolerate him.

She thinks it was the last part that did her in; her family kept nagging her about everything, too, and her mom had mentioned David more than once, and she'd be thrilled if Carrie told her they were dating. Plus, if she had to fake-date anybody, she'd have to spend time with them, and she could really use the excuse to spend time with David.

"Okay, then," she said, "we're doing this."

"Sweet," said he, "just let me get my ninja apparel."

"No ninja apparel," she said firmly.

"Spy equipment?"

"No spy equipment," she said, and hung up on him.

And now she's here, at this fundraising gala FOX roped them both into, trying to get up the courage to go through with it, to make the whole world, including her family and friends and publicist, who's going to be furious, believe she's in love with David Cook.

She can do this. She just needs to take one step towards him, and from then it'll be easy to just fall into the web of lies they have planned.

It's probably sad that the thing that snaps her into action is a guy with a mike approaching her. She pretends to be distracted and wanders off towards David; she basically runs away from one unappealing thing head-on into another.

It's not as scary once she's standing by his side; she laces her fingers through his, and he looks down at her, squeezing her hand.

She nods lightly once, just to herself, and her heels hover an inch or two above the floor as she tilts her head up and brushes their lips together.

It's not a big damn kiss or anything. It's just a quick peck, like a greeting, enough to make the interviewer and several media-type people around them pause and stare.

When she pulls back, his eyes seem slightly wider, confused. She shakes her head, shrugs it off; he's probably not as confident about this whole idea as he was pretending to be for her sake, and that's okay. That's fine.

She takes a deep breath and looks around, and — okay, she knows it's pushing her luck, but she wants to do it so bad she just goes ahead and does: she bites her lip coyly, glance jumping around the room like she hadn't realized there were people around.

Then, she grimaces, regretful and apologetic, and says, "Hi?"

And that's how things get rolling.

They ignore most of the intrusive questions that get to them, and answer the simple ones dismissively, with just, "Yes, I'm dating him," and, "Yes, we've been together for a couple of months now."

When they manage to get away, they go out for drinks at a club owned by a friend of David's. They sit at a table near the back, and it's good. She feels great. It's like all the tension she was carrying around has dissipated, and she is so thankful to him for that.

"Well, I'm glad," he says, "especially since you vetoed all of my ideas."

"I didn't veto anything—"

"You vetoed my skywriting idea," he points out.

"I couldn't say yes to that after you said no to writing a painfully specific song about it," she says. "It was a matter of principle."

"The big announcement on the cover of People? 'I'm dating Carrie Underwood.' That had a pretty nice ring to it, come on."

"I'm pretty sure that would only get cover rights if you were a girl."

"Ouch," he says, fist to his chest, "that hurts. I want to believe it would at least get one of those little block-lettered squares on the column on the left. _At least_."

Her cell vibrates in her purse, interrupting the conversation. She sneaks out to the bathroom to take the call, and when she gets back to David, she sums it up with, "We missed something."

"What?"

She huffs out a nervous laugh. "It's November."

"Wasn't that your dad? I thought I saw it on the screen."

"Yeah."

David frowns at her. "And he told you that it's November."

"No," she says. "Yeah. He asked if it was true, you know, us, and I said yes, and he asked how long I'd been seeing you, and I said, a while, and then he asked why I'd kept it from them."

"This is a really long build-up to your point," he says. She scowls at him as she slips into her chair again.

"I told him I wanted to keep it off the press and to myself until I was—sure. And he said, 'Well, I hope you are now, because your mother will not hear of him spending Thanksgiving anywhere but with us.'"

"Ah," he says, leaning back in his chair slowly, face blank. "That kind of November."

"Yeah."

"So, we need to—"

Carrie snorts. "Get used to lying to our friends before that."

"We can do that," he says, sitting back up and grabbing his glass, nodding smugly.

"Right," she says, and picks up her own glass, holding it up, "to being dirty rotten liars."

"To being dirty rotten liars," he echoes, and clicks their glasses together.

*

As it turns out, it's easy. It's easy because nobody asks questions; when she reintroduces him to her friends as her boyfriend, the most anybody asks is when it happened. Her divorce is still recent, and her friends have heard enough about her distaste for talking about it to know they shouldn't make her. Apparently, in their minds, that extends to David, too, and her relationship with him.

The only real difference is that they hold hands more often, and his band acquire a filter that lasts about a week before they go back to making fun of her.

He was right. There's really nobody else she'd feel this at ease lying with. That's probably not a good thing, but Mike has stopped yelling at her about telling the paps to leave him alone, and he's also finally acquiesced into selling the house, and just — _everything_ is so much easier now that she's dating David. She thought the lies would balance things out, that she'd feel bad, but whenever she does, he makes it sound so _logical_ she can't help but agree with his reasoning.

For the first time since she and Mike started fighting and stopped making up, she feels like she can breathe.

*

The easiness doesn't last very long.

The day before Thanksgiving, she catches the same flight as David, and it's only once she's seated and the plane's taking off that she realizes it's the first time they've been alone and unwatched since they came out as a couple to everyone.

She's fine with it. Up until now, she had no reason to believe she should be anything but fine with it.

It's David who's acting weird. He's distracted, and weirdly fidgety, and he's talking a lot less than usual, and every time she moves or reaches for something, he closes in on himself or winces or sits back, like he doesn't want her to even brush against him. It's odd.

"You've already met my parents, you remember that, right?" she says.

"Yeah," he says, "I know. I'm not nervous."

"Well, you look it," Carrie says.

"I'm just kind of sleep-deprived," he says. "That's it. I'll be fine once we get to your house."

It's not very reassuring, but he does doze off around the same time she hits the second chapter on the book she's reading, so at least she knows the part about him being tired is true.

It also seems he was right about just needing some sleep to be fine, because reintroducing him to her family goes really well. Her parents really do like him, even though they're slightly warier of him now, but he weathers it all effortlessly, and he goes back to acting normal around her again.

She can't shake off the feeling that something's off, though. Like, yeah, he's acting normal, but what's normal for them right now, in public, with her family, is a lie, and it feels more like a lie than usual. When she walks into the kitchen and he wraps an arm around her waist, leaning in to kiss her cheek, it feels cold. It feels weird. At another point, they're in the living room, not really talking, and he pecks her on the lips just as her sister comes in, and it feels so distant, so unfriendly.

She tries to fix it, to pour herself into it more than usual; she holds his hand under the table a few times during dinner, and that loosens him up enough that he starts leaning in more often, whispering things in her ear, random remarks and stupid jokes. They're all things he'd normally say, but there's something so — _restrained_ about the way he says them. Even the way he leans in is wrong; he rests his hand on the edge of the chair, fingers whole inches away from her thigh. When her hair gets in the way of her ear, he doesn't make a move to tuck it behind it.

It hits her that it's the part of the charade that's not really a charade at all, that's just supposed to be how they act around each other as _friends_ , that seems to be giving him trouble.

He excuses himself after dinner, when her sisters bring out the board games and her dad turns on the TV and her cousins join her mom in the kitchen. She does too, and she assumes David will be in the living room when she goes back there, but he's not.

She normally wouldn't think anything of it, but it feels like he's disappeared on purpose; when her mom asks where he is, she just goes upstairs to find him.

It doesn't take long; she heads straight for the room that acts as her bedroom when she's around and a study when she isn't. He's sitting on her bed, elbows on his knees, forehead resting on the ball of his hand, and he's just there. He's not doing anything. He has no reason to be here instead of downstairs, except for how defeated he looks, even if he glances up and puts on a smile as soon as he sees her.

She walks in carefully and closes the door.

"Is something wrong?" she asks, stepping in closer.

"No," he says, shrugging, "why would it be?"

"Because you're hiding," she offers, sitting down next to him, close enough that she can speak low and he'll hear her. That feels like a good thing to her; she has a feeling she's not settling in for a loud kind of conversation, something they can do at a distance. She needs to be close.

He rolls his eyes and snorts a laugh. She's convinced he's going to deny there's anything wrong again, but instead, he says, "I—I don't know if I can keep doing this."

"What?" she says, barely a murmur. "Why?" she asks, a little louder.

"It's just—" He rubs his palm on the front of his jeans. "It's weird."

Carrie bites her lip. "But we both knew it would be. We knew going in," she tries. "So why—"

"No," he says, shaking his head, pausing to gather the words. "No, I don't mean that this whole thing is weird. It is, sometimes, but that's not it. I mean it's making _me_ weird."

"That's not very—" _Illuminating_ , she wants to say. He'd like that, but it seems like the wrong thing to say.

He takes a deep breath, shoulders and chest rising as he sits up. "It's bringing stuff back," he says.

"What kind of—" she begins, trailing off when he opens his mouth to go on.

"It's bringing stuff back that I thought was dead. Dead and buried. It's just all coming back and it's bad, okay?" She must look as confused and helpless as she feels, because his tone lowers again as he adds, "I can do this. I can keep doing this, I can keep pretending we're together, but not without you knowing. I'm starting to feel like I'm taking advantage of you and I don't like it."

"Come on, if anyone's taking advantage of anyone here, it's—" _me_ , she's going to say, _it's me_ , but he kisses her before she has a chance.

For a kiss possibly meant to shut her up, it's not very aggressive at all. It's soft, prudent, just his mouth on hers. His lips are a little dry, and she wonders why this is the first time she's noticed anything about them; they've kissed more times that she's kept track of.

None of those times were like this. This is — this is _real_ , and she doesn't know if she responds because of that or because she's used to faking it, but she does either way, tilting her face to meet him until the kisses turn less cautious, less distant, until he's biting her bottom lip and opening up her mouth and licking in.

She's the one who brings them back to soft and chaste, when she realizes what they're doing. She also places a hand on his shoulder, keeping him in place as kindly as she can, before she pulls away.

There's a short stretch of silence where she looks at him and doesn't know what to say. She just doesn't know what she's supposed to get from this; that he likes her? That he wants—what does he want?

His thumb and forefinger are still on her chin, stroking the underside softly, when he breaks the silence. "I meant I don't want to do this without you knowing I _want_ to do that. It's not a lie. I want to do that. All the fucking time, I want to do that."

"I—" she begins. It's still hard to process. David is her friend, he's one of her best friends, and this never even crossed her mind when she agreed to pulling a PR stunt with him. She didn't think of it. She's never thought of it. "I don't," she finishes, shoulders rising in an apologetic shrug. He bites his upper lip, taking his hand back. His face is blank. "I'm sorry? I was with Mike so long, I never really thought—"

"I know," David says, offering a small smile. "It's okay. I didn't expect you to— It's okay. I just wanted you to know. So you can decide if you want to keep doing this. If it makes you uncomfortable that—" He laughs, shaking his head at himself. "That every time you kiss me in public from now on, you're going to be thinking _Is he enjoying this?_ "

"I'm not going to be thinking that," she says dismissively. "I mean, I don't think that's really the—the issue here. You know what I mean? You're the one who's—who this isn't fair to."

He shakes his head, and when he speaks, his voice is even again, reasonable and certain. "Don't back out because of me. This isn't any more your fault than it was when I fell for you the first time—"

She feels her jaw drop open despite herself at that, because— "Whoa. Wait, what do you mean the _first_ time?"

"I told you," he says. "This is bringing things back. I thought I was over it, I wouldn't have suggested this otherwise. But apparently I'm not. Not entirely." His voice is even less emotional than before, just _factual_ , and she realizes it's not that he's detaching himself; this is just a _thing_ for him. It's something that exists, something he's even used to, and she can't believe she never knew.

"But that's—" she begins, not sure where she's going. "Isn't this— My publicist will kill me, but we can call it all off if you want. We still have all those interviews lined up, I can go alone and just say we broke up if you need space."

"I don't need space." He stands up. "I got over it without space once, I can do it again. I suggested this so you'd get a break from all the press abuse, and I don't want you to have to deal with that again just because I assumed things wouldn't come to this. Trust me, if you're okay with this, I'm okay with this."

It's the decision _she_ was supposed to make, right there, laid out in bullet points. He's made it for her. She wants everyone to keep believing they're dating; it's made everything so much easier, and he knows that, and he's letting her have it. He's turned the problem around; now, if she wants to be a good person, make sure he doesn't get hurt, she has to tell him she's bothered by this. She has to tell him she's uncomfortable that he has feelings for him. That's not something she can just say.

"I'm okay with this," she says, smiling, taking his hand when he holds it out to pull her onto her feet.

She guesses she'll have to be.

*

She believes he can get over his feelings for her again. She believes that wholeheartedly.

She doesn't believe he can continue fake-dating her the way he was before, though, mostly because he can't. He can't, but it's not him. It's her. She can't seem to let him.

There's an event they're scheduled to attend together in early December, an awards show, and they're seated at the same table—obviously—and it's suddenly really awkward; she'll either go overboard when she leans in, squeezing his thigh like they're teenagers with no manners, or she'll keep her chair so far from him he won't even reach her hand when he tries to hold it. Whenever she wants to tell him something, she debates over it in her head for so long it stops being relevant.

It's just bad all around, and it's not just her who notices. They're going different places after the ceremony, but he shares a cab with her anyway, accompanying her to her destination before he leaves for his. That's when he mentions it.

"You're not comfortable," he says.

"Whatever makes you say that," she says flatly, and lets out a frustrated sigh.

"Do you think— I know you want to keep doing this, but we could have a — a grace period, I guess? We — came out," he says, tilting his head in the direction of the driver to explain why he's talking like their relationship is real, "because you wanted everyone to lay off Mike. That's the whole reason. I barely ever talk about my love life, and you didn't when you were with Mike. It would be completely normal if we lay low for a while."

She sighs again. He's right. She needs to get used to that, and he does need space, even if he won't admit it. It doesn't mean they're ending anything; they're just taking time to process things. Besides, Christmas is coming up, and they'd each spend it with their respective families anyway. It's not like they'd be out and about every night.

The way he puts it, it's an easy suggestion to agree to.

*

Only problem is, they didn't agree to completely ignore each other, and that's what she's doing anyway.

The first time she automatically says no when her publicist asks if Carrie's bringing a guest to an event doesn't seem that weird, but then she deliberately doesn't pick up when he calls, and then again, and again, maybe four times in one week, and it's not what they agreed to, but she can't bring herself to talk to him.

She's not sure what her problem is. He was straight to her about his feelings for her; there are no mixed signals, nothing to read into. He kissed her, she said no, he didn't even question her.

The thing is, it's not just David she hasn't thought about on a romantic or even sexual level. It's everyone. After the divorce, she felt like she really needed time for herself. The only times she thought about dating were purely theoretical, like, _maybe if I had a boyfriend, people would stop looking at me like I'm heartbroken and destined to be alone and depressed forever_ , but then she _got_ that, David gave her that, and she had other things to think about. She feels like she's been busy for months now: her last album dropped a couple of months after she announced her separation from Mike, and she's spent every spare moment over the last few weeks looking at houses in Nashville, Los Angeles, apartments in New York, all kinds of places. She's had events to attend and an upcoming tour to begin planning and some private shows and — she's just been busy.

But now it's December, and her workload is slowing down as Christmas approaches, things getting done so she can take a break to be with her family, and she's thinking about it. She's thinking about Mike, trying to track down when she stopped loving him, and she's thinking about David, trying to track down when he fell out of love with her.

It's horrible that she feels this way, she knows that, but a small, selfish part of her wants to know everything about that process, when David realized he felt more than friendship for her, why he never said anything, if he ever wanted to—to make a move, and why he never did. If she was already married when he started feeling that way about her. If he felt that way about her before she really fell in love with Mike, back when she and David were only just becoming friends and she had a little stupid crush on him from seeing him on TV and she — and she sometimes entertained thoughts about what it would be like to kiss him, or go on a date with him, or — or get pinned to a wall by him, or feel his beard brush the inside of her thighs. She still had passing thoughts about that when she was married. It was just — it wasn't a big deal, it was just passing thoughts. Everyone has thoughts like that. They don't mean anything.

They don't usually mean anything.

A couple of days before the new year, she realizes none of that makes a difference. She realizes she's avoiding asking herself if she was too quick to tell David she didn't feel the same way about him as he did for her.

But that's not a question she can readily answer. She doesn't _know_ how she feels about David right now. She can't say yes or no. That's the real problem: she doesn't have an answer.

*

Carrie's smart enough to know she's not going to find an answer by pretending it's all hypothetical, all in the past, and ignoring David in the present.

It's a good realization to have when she does, because she's scheduled to go to dinner with David about a week later, to a big restaurant opening. She's hopeful about that. Optimistic.

It doesn't go as well as she expects.

They're still at that stage where they're not sure what to say each other, and there's a lot of small talk, and talk about the weather, which is seriously bizarre to hear coming out of David's mouth, and maybe she looks at his mouth a little more than usual when the conversation dies down, and maybe he notices. She has no idea.

After dinner, they go back to the single hotel room his agent booked for them. It's a very silent cab drive, but it's not as awkward as dinner, probably because they're not supposed to put on a show when there's nobody watching.

They're not even through the door when she snaps. "Maybe you were right. Maybe we should break up."

"Okay?" he says, frowning and closing the door behind them.

"Not, like, as friends. That's not—I mean, most relationships don't last that long. Especially after a divorce. And by now the press is convinced I'm not still carrying a torch for my cheating ex-husband, so, we should probably break up."

David cocks his head. "Right now?" He's not serious, and she feels something loosen in her stomach at the shift in tone.

"Well, no," she says, "but we should consider it."

"We should consider pretending to break up," he echoes. "Okay. How? I say we buy a rack of clothing and have a very loud, very public fight outside your new house where you throw it all out the window while I stand half-naked in the driveway."

She laughs, toeing off her shoes, and sits down on the couch in the small living room in their suite. "Yeah, I don't think we can give notice without ruining the realism."

"That is true," he says, dropping on an armchair nearby. "How about I accidentally send my entire contact list a disturbingly incriminating break-up e-mail about how I can't put up with your freaky foot fetish anymore?"

"I don't have a foot fetish," she says, wriggling her toes. Those heels were deadly.

"You have very cute feet, though," he says.

"You need to shut up about my feet unless you're willing to give me a massage," she says, one eyebrow raised.

"If that's the price to pay for being able to talk about whichever part of your body I choose, I think I can probably pay it." He holds out a hand, and she looks at it for a moment before taking him up on it. "That said," he adds once they've both settled into a comfortable position where her leg isn't stretched to the point of hurting, "if we're breaking up, maybe I should start by not spending the night in your hotel room."

"It's our hotel room," she says. "We can begin to drift apart tomorrow."

"I guess that's true," he says, nodding. "We should at least wait for the canoes to be delivered." She huffs out a snort and kicks his forearm. "Are you this aggressive when you sleep, too? I'm reconsidering this bed-sharing thing."

"I don't hit unless you make me," she says, eyes sharp on him. He just grabs her foot again, and her gaze falls to his hands and stays there.

He's not bad at this. He's not bad at all, but she's not thinking about foot massages when she watches his fingers move; she's thinking about all the times she's looked at his hands before, all the times she's thought about them on her. Given they were all mostly passing thoughts, she's surprised to remember specific instances of them, but that's not really a big deal; what baffles her the most is that now she can't stop thinking about his hands going up her leg, about David taking off her tights, the rest of her clothes, using his fingers somewhere else.

It's not a revelation. It's more like that part of her mind is stirring, waking up after sleeping for a while.

She blinks herself out of her stupor. "By the way, what you said about my new house—I actually did find one," she points out.

"You did? Where?"

"Nashville," she says, and he beams at her, and she lets a grin take over her own face.

"I'll come help you move in," he offers. "If you want. I mean, people probably expect me to help out. And help you christen every surface."

"Yeah," she says, "we shouldn't risk blowing our cover. Besides, what are friends for if not carrying your boxes for you, right?"

"Exactly," he says.

He actually ends up falling asleep on the couch that night, and she doesn't feel capable of asking if he did it on purpose the next morning. She's not ready to have that conversation.

*

The first thing he remarks on when she shows him around her new, empty house is the bare mattress on the floor of the room that will become the master bedroom.

"My sister's idea of a housewarming present," Carrie explains.

"Your sister got you a mattress," he says incredulously. He's standing by the door, a few feet away from where she just did a really ridiculous flourish to introduce her new huge, empty bedroom.

"She was dropped on the head, it's a long story. So, what do you think of the house? It's awesome, right?"

He looks around the bedroom, and then turns to glance over his shoulder, down the stairs. It's a long appraising look, and she finds herself dancing on the balls of her feet a little, waiting. It's only a polite question; she's bought the place already, and she loves it, and she's not going to change her mind even if he hates it.

She kind of wants him to like it anyway.

"It's — big," is his verdict.

"I meant what do you think of the house besides that," she clarifies.

David makes a noncommittal sound and walks into the room, walks towards her. "It has the potential to be awesome if you don't overload it with ugly-ass furniture?"

She laughs. "You're kind of an ass."

"Well, I'm not the one asking someone who's in love with me what they think about my bedroom," he says, shrugging. "I'm just saying."

She blinks.

He doesn't mean anything by it. She knows he doesn't mean anything by it because his tone is so _castual_ , like it's just this conversational remark he thought of and couldn't hold in, but she can't help feeling it like a slap across the face. A soft slap. It's not — painful, not the way he says it, but it's a reminder, and it's a striking one.

"That was the wrong thing to say," he adds when she doesn't say anything for a while.

"Yeah," she says, biting the inside of her cheek, "yeah, it was." It's not like she held a freaking _gun_ to his head. Their pretend relationship was out and out _his_ idea, and he agreed to come by of his own volition. They're friends, they're—

He stops on his tracks; he's barely a foot away now, and she meets his eyes and can't continue thinking. It's like she can't do anything but just look at his face — the attention in his eyes, the dazed droop of his lids, the way his mouth is half open, tongue peeking out, wetting his lips.

She wants to—she wants to, but it's him who kisses her, rolling the bottom half of her shirt in his fist and drawing her in. It's nothing like the soft, chaste way he kissed her Thanksgiving night; this time there's intent behind it, and she arches into his body when the hand on her shirt moves to her hip, when it slides into her back pocket.

This time, when he bites her lip, she opens her mouth and doesn't attempt to close it after; she plasters herself to him instead, shutting her eyes and grasping at his shoulders.

He lets go of her for a second and her knees wobble, sending her flying back onto her ass. The random spoof-gift bare mattress cushions the fall, and she wants to apologize for that, and she wants to say _Maybe we should wait to do this on an actual bed_ , but he's looking down at her, crawling onto his knees between her open thighs with this look in his eyes that makes her feel like she can't move, can't go anywhere, like she's being held in place and she wants to be, like the last thing she wants to do is disrupt that imaginary grip.

She lies back on the mattress and he leans down over her, propping himself on his elbows as he kisses a path from the end of her v-neck up to her collarbone, her neck, and back to her mouth.

He's breathing hard when he pulls away, and his entire body radiates so much heat she feels warm all over, on the brink of starting to sweat without having even strained herself yet.

To her surprise, her shirt doesn't rip when he uses it to bring her up with him as he kneels up. She bends her own knees at both sides of his to feel a little more connected to the ground, and he hoists her up onto his thighs, hand coming up to tuck her hair behind her ear and cradle her jaw into a kiss that's somehow both unrestrained and slow — calmer than before, like there's time.

"I'm not going to stop if you don't tell me," David says against her lips, hands yanking her shirt up over her chest until she lifts her arms and he can pull it over her head.

"I don't have plans to tell you that," Carrie says, "if that helps any," and she feels herself grin as he smiles at her.

She's not sure who laughs first, but they end up laughing at once, just a few seconds of shaking off the tension. "Okay, so we're good," he says when they calm down, and she nods, rolling her hips into his, not even a little less turned-on than before.

It's better, actually. It feels realer, makes her feel more present. It's good. It's really good.

It's so good in no time she's reaching down between their bodies to get his fly open, palm him through his underwear, and she feels it deep in her stomach when he groans into her neck. Getting her pants off isn't as easy; they're pretty tight, and she struggles to get them off without standing up. Normally she wouldn't take off her panties at the same time, but she doesn't want to go through that horrifying process again, which is a pretty good excuse.

Of course, the very second it's all off and tossed off to the opposite end of the mattress, she remembers they can't do this without a condom and she has a couple of them in the pocket of those pants, and she nearly falls over trying to get to them.

"I didn't have you pegged for someone who carried condoms around in her pocket," he tells, snatching the foil packet from her hand as she straddles his thighs again. She pushes his pants down and helps him out of his sweater, and he stretches his legs out underneath her and kicks off his pants and boxers the rest of the way off.

"Well, you never really asked about my sex life, did you?"

"That's a fair point," he agrees, and proceeds to show her exactly how wrong she was when she said she didn't feel anything for him.

*

He has a few shows that week, warm-up for a tour that begins in late February, and she doesn't see him much after that. It's not awful. It's not awful, but it's stressful: after she misses him on the phone twice, she starts wondering if _he_ 's regretting sleeping with her — if he's having second thoughts about getting involved with someone who has yet to figure out where the hell she stands.

Because she's as stumped as she was before — she knows there's _something_ , but she needs time, and he's had time. He's had so much time to figure out what he wants from her and she's just _starting_ to and she wouldn't blame him if he wanted to — to cool things off, or make her wait.

She doesn't see him before an interview and photoshoot they scheduled ages ago, this article they're doing for the Valentine's Day edition of a magazine. It's odd, waiting for him to show up in the lobby of a hotel in New York, surrounded by photographers and lights and fearing he's going to back out. It would be an effective way of saying no to her, not showing up at an interview where they're supposed to rehash the fake story of how they got together.

They went over it together on the phone a couple of days ago, and he said he was going to show up — that if they started dating now, they could just pretend they'd been doing it longer than they really had.

It was an _if_. An _if we start dating now_. And she shouldn't be fretting over something that small, but she hates waiting. Then again, if he doesn't come, she could just announce their relationship is over. It probably wouldn't be such a terrible move.

She's going over possible break-up statements in her head when she sees him come in through the revolving doors. She laughs because that's how her body deals with relief. She _laughs_.

He smiles at everyone on his way with ridiculous ease, and then he walks her a little ways away from everyone, into the open space beside the staircase, just to say hello.

"This is going to be _weird_ ," she says.

"It's not going to be weird," he says. "It's the same thing we've been doing for three months."

"But it's—" She gestures between them vaguely. There's a real part now.

"It's a charade," David says easily, "there are cameras everywhere. There's no way you're going to slip up."

She nods.

"We're on the same page now, right?" he asks, hopeful, and it hits her that he must have been worrying about this too — that she's been as MIA from his end as he's been from hers.

She grins, cupping his face with her hand. "Yeah," she says, "mostly, yeah. I think you're still a little bit ahead of me. But if you're okay with that—"

"With being more certain than you are? Hell, yes. I was counting on it. Don't you see the potential for guilt-tripping you into sexual favors? I choose to see it as a pro."

"God," she says dryly, monotonous, "you're so charming," but she kisses him anyway, soft, cautious, experimental. They've kissed before, but this is new; this is _real_ , and she finds she wants to get a taste of it before they shove a camera and a recorder in her face and she has to start going over things that aren't real. That aren't _as_ real.

A flash goes off, shining over her eyes, and she ducks her head into her collar, suddenly shy. She doesn't want this on camera.

It's what they're here for, though, so she turns around with a smile. Soon enough, he's going through the tale of how he'd pined for her for years and she was always taken, and then when she stopped being taken, her divorce was so recent it felt like a dick move to rush her into anything, so he kept his mouth shut until she made the first move.

"He left me no choice," she says easily.

He turns to her and meets her gaze straight on as he says, "I didn't want to be your _rebound_."

There's a truth to that that she doesn't see coming, and it's oddly eye-opening: she's past rebounds now. She's — she's really over Mike.

She's still not entirely sure where she stands with regards to David, but if there's one thing she's sure of, it's she wants to find out.


End file.
